The Debatable Land Part 20

"Very well."

He wrote a few words on a sc.r.a.p of paper and handed it to Gard.

"May I keep this tract in exchange?"

"It is not exchanged. It is given."

Gard turned his horse. The general looked up.

"You are a young man"--silence--"But your sect takes no part in wars."

Gard waited. "Do you know the subject of this tract?"

"It is on the text, 'I must be about my Father's business.'"

The general seemed to have in mind to say more. He looked at Gard peculiarly--not quite as the others had seemed to do, half suspecting, half recognizing an alien being, a moral and mental unknown at some withdrawn height, but as if recognizing one like himself in isolation and pilgrimage, and so understanding his bearing and capacity for silence.

The hors.e.m.e.n behind whispered and smiled.

"Very well." The general turned again to the working squads, and Gard rode away in the smoke that drifted from the fires across the track. He had a sense, too, of some flash of recognition that had gone below the part he was playing, and seemed to involve a salutation and question of other import and circ.u.mstance, a recognition of kinship in the knowledge of other realities than the feet walk upon or the eyes see; knowledge of the silence out of which one is born, of the flux of his present, of destiny in ambush, of the "stream of the flying constellations," and the steady pour of time, "inhaled as a vapor;" knowledge of the individual's own lonely issue in the midst of these. But the turning again to his working squads seemed to have been the general's solution--or, at least, conclusion. "Very well;" one must be about the business set him to do.

"He must work in his garden," had been more than one sage's conclusion.

Gard did not entirely wish to work his way back to the point of view that once had been his, of a spectator of events, who only acted in them in order to appreciate them vividly. He wished to regain his old enthusiasm, the poise and the clear sense of things, the interest, dulled since the Peninsular campaign; and for the rest, to go on to positions requiring new definitions. So far as the general had served as a councillor, he had seemed to advise attention to business, to imply that there was personal value in simple and direct doing.

During the two following days Gard rode along the railroad to Winchester, and up and down the Opequan valley, picking up information and asking such questions as he could make bear on the distribution of tracts. Once or twice he thought he recognized a face he had seen across the road by the Dunker church. It was not impossible. But one could not identify from such smoky glimpses.

On Sat.u.r.day he left Winchester and went eastward, crossing the Opequan where the turnpike led by a shallow, rippling ford, and the flat-fenced meadows of the bottom lands were all about. His saddle-bags were nearly empty, and beyond the Blue Ridge he might find means to send a message north.

A horseman was watering his horse at the ford, his hat tipped back, a bandage around his head. They greeted, and Gard handed him a tract.

"Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown." It was one of the faces he seemed to have seen.

"Oh, you're that missionary they call 'Abstract Piety.' Well, look here!"

He stopped and stared. Gard leaned forward to let his horse drink, saw his own face in the stream, and wondered what it might mean to the man with the bandage who watched him, and whom he had somewhere seen. It might be a critical question, what his face meant to the man with the bandage. Crises! As one went on, every step was a crisis between the moment past and the moment in front. The current streaked the reflections in the water, and there were little brown minnows holding their heads up-stream. He noticed his own expression in the reflection--the impa.s.sive mask that he had come to wear without effort, the spade-shaped beard, the lips whiter than the rest of the tanned skin, which might suggest to the acute that the shaving of them was recent, the swift curve of the hair-line, the heavy eyelids over eyes that looked up dreamily out of the wavering water. He thought that, from an artistic standpoint, he must look his part, or something like it, with an emphasis. But every one travels by his own road to his own conclusions. The man, whose white bandage wavered and gleamed in the water near his own reflection, reminded him of one from whom he had taken a pistol in the cornfield by the Dunker church, whose eyes had been mad and glaring, and his hair soaked in his own blood. In fact, that was the face. Crises! Did it mean the sudden end of his running days? Probably either his or the other man's. Their reflections in the stream seemed to parody them, to watch and mimic. The water chuckled.

There was something ironic in things. One fancied the current of time itself to be streaming and streaked yellow in the sunlight, and full of bubbles. The minnows poised and darted against the stream.

Gard's horse flung up his head with a start.

"If the message I have given you is not for you, will you not give it to another?"

As he left the water he heard the other's horse splashing behind him.

The road turned from the river through a sandy cut in the woods. At the woods' edge the bandaged head was beside him.

"Stranger, you don't happen to have that gun about you you stole from me?"

Gard turned and looked into the small, black, fatal circle of a pistol barrel, like an eye-socket with the ball in ominous retreat.

"I do not carry weapons," he said, quietly.

"You don't! I reckon you do. You ought to have plugged me down at the ford with one of those weapons you don't carry. We're going back."

"If you wish to take my life--"

"I'd like to, mightily."

"Very well."

"You're a Yankee spy. Wheel around there and keep ahead."

"This mistake delays me. I have permission--"

"Keep your hand out of your pocket."

Gard paused an instant, then said: "Very well," and turned his horse slowly to the right, shook his left foot from the stirrup, and guided his horse close in. Their right shoulders almost touched. He gripped the man's pistol-hand and throat with the same movement. The pistol spat past his cheek. He heaved, left foot in the saddle, and leaped. The man gurgled, and they fell over his horse's cruppers heavily in the road, the man below on his bandaged head. The bandage fell off; his blood trickled into the dust, and he lay still. The horses had cantered apart.

Gard twisted his head around as he lay athwart, looked an instant, and loosened his hand from the black-bearded throat. The grip was so hard and sinewy, it was like untying a knot. It took effort, as if his muscles had been screwed up and rusted in place. The man was dead or stunned.

Gard got up with the pistol in his hand. He brushed his own clothes, caught his horse, sent the other's with a cut from a switch galloping away into the woods, and came back. He found cartridges and a gla.s.s flask full of whiskey in the man's pockets, and put them in his own. If not dead, perhaps he had better be; otherwise one must change disguise, and proper disguises were not easy. He slipped a cartridge and c.o.c.ked the trigger.

The sun above the trees shone on the livid face in the dust. It was about noon, and the hour that Mavering stalked from the sandy road-bed thirty miles away into the charred forest and murmured: "It's not my funeral. It appears to be the anchorite's."

On the whole, the neighborhood was too lively for loose pistol-shooting.

Gard lifted the limp body and carried it into a thicket, brought the bandage and laid it beside, kicked the dust over the blood-pools in the road, mounted his horse and smoothed his face, trying to settle its placidity.

He trotted and cantered all the afternoon northeastward among low hills, pa.s.sing many untroubled farm-yards, but little soldiery. A couple of hors.e.m.e.n said, "Howdy, elder," and seemed to have met with him and his mission before. He gave them one of his few remaining tracts absent-mindedly, without answering, came when the sun was low to the Shenandoah, and heard it murmur its musical name.

"Probably he'd been more convenient dead."

The bridge was burned. He swam his horse through the current. The blue mountains fronted him darkly against the sky. The turnpike led up through a gap and so over into the elder Virginia. It was dark when he reached the end of the meadow lands where the upward pitch and the woods of the mountain road began. "Probably he'd be handier that way."

At the top of the gap were open pastures, a cabin where a dog barked, but no light shone in the windows. The stars were out innumerably, the valley behind in the cold, blue vapor of the night.

"But it might be better to change the part, after all," he thought; "better for luck."

Fortune might grow weary, a good mule be overworked, a good tune sung too long; for instance, the doxology was a good tune, two-four time, the measure of the tread of the moral law, a taciturn, single-minded tune, something like the general who sat his horse awkwardly by the burning railroad.

The moon that was slender and new at Antietam had grown round as a shield and rose late. Beyond the pastures on the gap the road led down through the woods to the elder land asleep in the moonrise.

"_Einst, O Wunder, einst_," the world and the young man, the big wars, the stir of living! And how wonderful then the moon and the night's infinite valleys, the glory of being and of loneliness, when to be a living soul was royal and the splendor of the night was its crown, when palpable currents, rivers thrilling and divine, poured into it, as the universe paid homage to its worth. Gard felt that he had somewhere lost his resonance. He must look for another coat and a happier disposition, shave his beard and shake dice with chance again. The road plunged down into the cavern of the woods. He let his horse pick his way, and judged the character of the road-bed from the sound of his steps below in the darkness.

Chapter XVI

Which Discloses one Daddy Joe, and Disposes of an Evangelist

It was chilly at that height. Gard rode all night down the mountain-side, and saw at last the lights of moon and sunrise mingling over the meadows and cornfields of a plantation close below him. The forest grew thinner and broke into clearing and pastures. He left the highway by an old cart-road whose ruts were gra.s.s-grown, though its centre was trodden hard by many human feet, and pa.s.sed an empty building of rough boards--a school-house or a negro church. The big chestnuts hung over it, and underbrush grew up to its windows. The path went to the door, swerved aside through the thicket, and at last ran into a little, lonely, hollow pasture, with the sunlight pouring over its edge as into a cup. He picketed his horse to a thin sapling that would bend and let the horse eat, and lay down near a bowlder where the sunlight seemed to be the yellowest, smiling to feel the warmth steal through him. "There's too much luxury in my bones for an evangelist." Presently he was asleep. The sun mounted, swung around by the south, and the shadow of the bowlder went over the sleeper. An old negro, with bowed head and cane in hand, stumped vigorously along the path towards the building under the chestnuts. He pa.s.sed the bowlder on the other side, and saw neither the sleeper nor the horse picketed among the saplings and feeding quietly. He wore a suit of fine broadcloth, the coat lined with silk and stained and threadbare, a white vest, a blue, dotted cravat, and a soft, gray hat. After that the clearing was silent except for pa.s.sing crows and drowsy insects.